DC police want real time monitoring for hundreds of surveillance cams

Police in Washington, DC currently have hundreds of surveillance cameras deployed across the nation’s capital, but law enforcement is looking to get real time access in order to put the entire city on constant watch.

The District of Columbia’s vast surveillance system currently
allows officers of the law to look at recorded footage from over
150 speed cameras, 50 red light lenses and more than 120 other
closed-circuit television cams, with feeds relatively easy for
the Metropolitan Police Department to both request and receive. A
recent report in the Washington Times revealed that those appeals
are being made more often than ever, with requests for footage
surging 15 percent more in 2012 than the year prior. Officers
with the MPD are looking for more, though, and are asking for
unfettered, real-time access to that footage, putting the city’s
half-a-million residents under the all-seeing eye of Big Brother.

Cops in DC currently aren’t allowed to access real-time footage
from surveillance cameras at a drop of the hat, but city leaders
are asking for that ability in order to curb violent crime.
That’s their excuse, at least, and it’s already worked in locales
including Chicago, Illinois and Baltimore, Maryland. There law
enforcement already can watch hundreds of surveillance camera
feeds at any given time, a tool that police say puts them ahead
of the criminals they are looking to track. But while studies
haven’t been able to conclude that real-time monitoring is all
that useful, the MPD is eyeing the opportunity to observe every
inch of the city at any time nonetheless.

According to the Times article from this week, police requested
surveillance cam data last year a total of 931 times,
accumulating sometimes dozens of hours’ worth of intelligence
from a single source. At the current rate, MPD officers are posed
to put in more than 1,200 requests by the end of the calendar
year, but creating a way to watch any intersection at any time
may bring that number down, and with it the rate of crime. Civil
libertarians, however, have an argument as well.

Councilmember Tommy Wells, a Democrat in DC’s Ward 6 district who
intends to run for mayor in 2014, told the Post that he wants
cops across the city to have instant access to the hundreds of
cameras owned by both the MPD and the local Department of Motor
Vehicles and their 200-plus traffic monitoring units. Citing a
recent drive-by shooting in the city, Wells said, “If they had
been able to use the camera in real time, they would have been
able to catch them right off the bat.”

Currently, police in DC can view cameras in real time, but are
limited to the capacity they can do as much. “Active
monitoring can only take place in a single location, the control
center that is employed to monitor cameras and other alert
technology,” the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center
determined with a study published in September 2011. “Those
engaged in active monitoring are all sworn personnel and they,
along with other officers working in the control center
monitoring room, must sign a statement acknowledging the rules
regarding the privacy rights of those being monitored.”

That same study determined that that technique was ineffective,
though, concluding, “Cameras alone did not appear to have an
impact on crime in DC.” The institute suggested that two
reasons are responsible for those unwelcomed results, and
predicted that repositioning cameras and actively monitoring them
on a routine basis could bring crime numbers down. That’s exactly
what Congressman Wells wants to do, and the city is already
discovering other options for increasing the scope of its
surveillance. Wells told the Times he wants to maneuver mobile
“hot spot” cameras to any part of the city at a given time, which
if all goes as planned will let someday-Mayor Wells make sure
every inch of the city is monitored in real-time, just like in
Chicago and Baltimore.

Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the American Civil Liberties
Union of the Nation’s Capital, sees a problem with this. “As
cameras become more and more ubiquitous, the government will be
able to use this data flow to sort of keep tabs on where
everybody is all the time,” he told the Post.

Speaking to DC’s Fox affiliate earlier this year, Wells also said
he wishes the city will scrap its current practice of requiring
two officers at a time to monitor live footage. And while that
might have some civil libertarians up in arms, the ACLU’s Spitzer
told DC’s Fox 5, "For a particular amount of time, for a
reason, I think that would probably make sense.”

As far back as 2008, DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier said she didn’t
have a problem with putting those feeds before a real set of
eyes, either. “I thought, 'Why the heck aren't we watching
them?'” she told the Post back then.

Meanwhile, those working for the federal government don’t have to
worry about the obstacles in place for city officials: DC’s
branch of the federal Homeland Security and Emergency Management
Agency pulls in feds from 4,500 cameras at any given moment, and
that’s just from lenses affixed in the school and mass transit
systems. Since at least 2011, the HSEMA has been hoping to add
private cameras owned by shop owners and others into that system.
So far the city’s been unable to wire its entire surveillance
infrastructure to one single hub, though, but that likely is
being made much easier thanks to the revenue some of those
cameras collect. In 2012, traffic cameras owned by the DMV and
fed to the local police netted $13 million for the city.